How to Think About Equity as a Startup Employee

Alexey Mitko is a partner at Co-Ventures, the architect behind Eucalyptus' ESOP plan, and widely known in the Australian ecosystem as "ESOP Guy." He was around employee number twenty at Canva and one of the early employees at Koala, giving him a front-row seat to three of Australia's biggest consumer tech outcomes.

In this episode, Cheryl and Maxine unpack how Alexey designed the ESOP plan that led to roughly $300 million distributed back to Eucalyptus employees, the largest ESOP payout in Australian history. He walks through the three questions every founder faces but rarely verbalises: who gets equity, how much, and why you have an ESOP plan in the first place.

You'll also hear how he modelled allocation across multiple rounds and hundreds of hires to avoid giving too much away early, why he personally walked the first two hundred employees through their equity, and why Australia's lack of a secondary market keeps ESOP feeling like monopoly money. Alexey closes with his Big Cojones moment: proposing to his wife, the most nervous he's ever been despite having climbed Europe's highest mountain.

00:00 – Intro

03:01 – The three ESOP questions every founder needs to answer

05:58 – How to model equity allocation across rounds and hundreds of hires

09:10 – Using ESOP as your most powerful recruitment and retention tool

12:02 – How walking 200 employees through their equity built culture and trust

15:02 – Open financials, shrinking cash balances, and what went wrong along the way

17:55 – Why Australia's ESOP ecosystem is still behind Silicon Valley

26:48 – Teaching employees to understand equity: the Google Sheet that started at zero

29:20 – High salary vs heavy equity: giving employees a real choice

32:16 – Common ESOP mistakes founders make and how to avoid them

35:03 – Why Australians treat startup equity like monopoly money

39:11 – The secondary market problem: why liquidity changes everything for ESOP

43:25 – Why your startup career is a portfolio of equity bets

46:36 – What angel investors can do to help portfolio companies build better ESOP plans

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